Every organization has a rich network of relationships that are vital to the sales and business development goals of the company, but coordinating and leveraging business networks is challenging. Many companies wish to maximize the potential of their employees' collective contacts, but the logistics of trading and comparing established relationships results in the loss of significant opportunities.
There are many approaches to comparing and leveraging collective contacts. The most basic is the business card or “rolodex” approach—each individual tracks their own relationships and solicits information from others with similar tracking methods. This approach suffers because “others” may not track their business relationships, or even remember their previous contacts. In some cases, “others” may not respond to a solicitation—such as a solicitation via a bulk e-mail request—when there is no readily-apparent personal benefit.
Another approach is to enter each employee's contacts in a searchable database. This is a time-consuming endeavor, requiring the manual input of the detail of each employee's contact. Moreover, this approach answers only “Who knows Person X?” and does not given an indication of how strong the relationship is between Person X and the company or the individual employees.
Electronic professional networks—such as LinkedIn, for example—could be described as a combination of the above approaches. In such networks, individuals enter their own professional details into a profile and “link” that profile to their contacts. The networks are typically based on an invite system—a pair of users are linked when one accepts an invitation from another. These systems fail, however, when a given professional network system not uniformly used and where a large number of professionals do not have the resources to maintain their profiles, accept invites, etc.
Other known approaches are described as “enterprise relationship management platforms,” such as Interaction IQ (distributed by LexisNexis) or ContactNet (distributed by Hubbard One/Thomson Reuters). In such networks, users must install software on their network and integrate that software with third party solutions like Customer Relationship Management technology. These systems require onsite installation and a minimum of three data integration points with the system (lightweight direct access protocol, address books, and message tracking logs). Such systems require resources to maintain, manage, and configure the software. Such systems may obtain e-mail communication data from e-mail log files. However, e-mail log files have limited information. Further, these systems fail to provide a data push method when a professional network wants to send data from an archive or spam filtering solution rather than an e-mail exchange system. These systems also fail to provide display names for professional networks because the display name data is not contained in message logs. Another disadvantage of these systems is their limit to the log files of particular software, such as Microsoft Outlook, and their reliance on the business contacts listing of end-users, such as the contacts listing in Microsoft Outlook. These failures limit the capacity of the systems to conveniently and comprehensively track the relevant relationship data.